Death by Water

by Alessandro Manzetti

  There were alternatives, though.

  Drowning was the most obvious. Laura could have been trapped in a room as the ship went down. She could have been crimped in half by collapsing metal. The steam could have burned her until the meat fell off the bone.

  And the sharks. Oh God. The sharks…

  The depth charge that trapped U-697 down here was a blessing for Sebastian at this point. He would have preferred the explosives simply blew the hull apart altogether. The sweet dark nothingness outside held a certain appeal.

  Maybe he’d do like Rosenblum. Sitting down here at the bottom of the sea waiting for the inevitable was a weary business.

  That knocking noise came again from overhead, as if it was reminding him it was there. Sebastian could tell that the noise wasn’t simply random debris falling from thousands of feet overhead.

  This was something natural. Maybe a pale, sightless fish latched its sucking mouth onto the hull, looking for sustenance on the ocean floor. Perhaps a spiny arthropod was impatient to slurp the marrow out of their bones.

  That didn’t seem right, though. This noise sounded purposeful.

  Whatever it was, it was still headed toward the exploded-out engine room. He looked down the dark, narrow hallway. The walls were covered with valves, switches, and meters. Barely an inch was free from pipes or other obstructions.

  The knocking came again.

  Sebastian pushed away from the coppery scent of Rosenblum’s blood. He walked with one hand against the tilted wall to keep his balance. What was that out there? Why did it sound so familiar?

  A shudder suddenly racked Sebastian’s frame. He realized where he knew that knock-knock-knock patter from.

  When Laura was a little girl in London, she broke her leg falling out of a tree. The leg didn’t set perfectly, so she walked with a slight hitch. Whenever she moved on a hard surface, Sebastian could always tell her pace was a little uneven from the sound of her footsteps. The knocking had the same rhythm of Laura on a leisurely stroll.

  Unbidden, his mind conjured a horrible image of a hunched, crooked figure walking across the top of their hull. The thought of a wraith with his wife’s face jittering among the shadows made his blood want to stop and reverse flow through his veins. It was repugnant, ghastly, and all too plausible in the dark unreality his mind had fallen into.

  Vague curiosity turned into a burning need to know what that noise was. He didn’t want to die with that awful image choking his mind.

  He slithered after the noise toward the rear of the ship. The passageway narrowed even further. U-boats were never built for the comfort of their inhabitants, and that only became worse as the ship rested at a drunken angle.

  Freezing seawater dripped onto the top of Sebastian’s head as he dropped onto his knees to navigate past a bent pipe. Even at a crouch, there was no other way through. The engine room lay just beyond. He’d have to slither on his belly.

  Cold metal caressed his stomach as he wriggled past. He lurched to a halt as his belt buckle caught on the pipe. For a moment, nothing gave. He was stuck.

  Those odd knocks marched past just overhead. Sebastian could reach out a hand and press it against the opposite side of the bulkhead, and then his fingers would only be separated from the source of those sounds by a thin veneer of steel. He almost did, but then he stopped himself. He wasn’t sure he wanted to have any contact, even indirect, with whatever was out there.

  It’s just an octopus or something investigating our submarine, he told himself. He had to look, though. Now that his imagination had kicked up that image, he couldn’t just leave the matter alone.

  He had to know, dammit.

  With a grunt and a heave, he finally hauled himself free of the bent pipe. He pitched over and landed face first in more cold water. It stank of oil and grease, the submarine’s leaking lifeblood. Being submerged in that would be like drowning in Satan’s septic tank. Spitting and sputtering, he pulled himself back into a crouch and moved the last few feet forward before steel ended and water began.

  The hatch to the engine room stood in front of him. A valve on the door kept the hatch doggedly closed and provided the only seal against the blackness outside. If the ship had plummeted another hundred meters deeper when it sank, the seal would have given way and killed them all.

  The footsteps had stopped. Footsteps. Sebastian pushed that term out of his mind. No, the knocks, the knocks that reminded him so achingly of Laura, had stopped. All he could hear was the murmur of voices and the creak of stressed metal.

  A window sat in the middle of the engine room door. Six inches of treated glass separated him from the cold hell beyond. Sebastian grabbed a flashlight off a nearby rack. He flicked the light on and placed it against the glass, probing the darkness.

  Blackness ate into the light like acid, devouring it before it could reveal more than a few feet. He could just make out the rent in the wall from the depth charge. Jagged metal peered at him like the maw of some giant, fanged fish.

  Klaus Zeller’s body floated at the very periphery of his light, trapped against the ceiling. The man was stuck in here when the sea came crashing through the wall. There wasn’t much left of him, and what was there had been smashed and compressed until his body looked like old dough that had been kneaded by crazed bakers.

  But that was it. There was nothing else out there. The engine room was completely empty.

  Something moved near the blown-out wall. Sebastian swung the flashlight back in that direction, sweat prickling his skin. There was no sign of whatever he’d seen, but his flashlight only reached so far.

  His conscious thoughts told him he probably hadn’t seen anything. That didn’t stop his lower brain from yammering that he sure as hell had seen something, some furtive, crawling shape slipping over the rim of the hole and skittering inside.

  Sebastian’s heart beat a staccato tune in his chest. He stared, pressing his face close to the window. His breath raised little plumes of steam on the glass.

  Pale silt danced among the shadows, drawing his eyes everywhere with phantom movement. He couldn’t see anything sliding along the walls or crawling across the floor, though. Certainly nothing person-shaped.

  Laura’s face appeared on the other side of the glass. Sebastian recoiled backward and banged his head against a rail. He dropped the flashlight, and it fell into the dirty water below. The light flickered out, leaving Sebastian with only the distant, fiery glow of the emergency signals. Outside, Laura raised a hand and tapped at the glass with her finger.

  “No. Oh no,” Sebastian said, unaware his mouth was even moving. That was Laura out there all right…only it wasn’t. The ocean had ravaged her beautiful face. Her eyes were simply two dark pits, the sockets hollowed out. Some sea creature had laid a clutch of pale eggs in the sockets, and she stared at him a hundred twitching pupils as the fish embryos within squirmed. Her hair floated around her in a dark halo. Her skin clung to her bones like moth-eaten cloth.

  Sebastian’s brain was caught somewhere between revulsion, amazement, and wet, sucking insanity. He took a step forward.

  Laura opened her mouth and voiced something to him. It’s so cold out here, Sebastian. Her tongue was gone. In its place, a nest of seaworms had taken root. Her ragged lips kept moving. Bitte, hilf mir. Please, help me.

  Fingers numb from shock and freezing water, Sebastian rubbed his eyes. The sea’s darkness seemed to cling to Laura’s very form as she pawed at the thick glass.

  Even if he couldn’t hear his wife’s words, they sliced into his brain like obsidian scalpels. I forgive you. Just be with me. It’s so cold.

  Sebastian’s limbs trembled. His mind told him that this wasn’t Laura. That this couldn’t be Laura. Laura was gone forever. This was something else, something masquerading in Laura’s skin, something that fed on the drowned.

  But he couldn’t deny his wife’s pleading lips. She was calling to him. They could be together again. He felt like Odysseus approaching the island of the sir
ens, knowing doom awaited him and not caring one wit.

  Be with me, Sebastian. Be with me forever. What was left of her lips quivered into a smile as he started to turn the wheel to open the hatch.

  GILLS

  by David J. Schow

  There had never been a lagoon, brown or black or otherwise; never really. Even without the help of civilized humans, the topography of the Amazon Basin both vanished and changed on an hourly basis. Soon only handfuls would remain—pressed leaves and desiccated insects on view in some museum.

  Manphibian sat cross-legged in a mesh recliner, on a teak deck which surrounded a pool shaped like Brazil, working his way through a tumbler of iced coffee as the sky over the Valley slowly shaded to nicotine. He thought calmly about his place in this world. Out here, the lung part of his dual-purpose breathing system had to labor thirty percent harder just to sort oxygen from the particulates and feed it to his body’s aeration network. He killed the coffee, slurping it through a straw since his fishy lips had never been able to close all the way.

  “Burrraaacck,” he said. He looked close at the webbing between his claws. Mites again. Dammit.

  Manphibian had the coolest bathroom in all of Hollywood. Stainless steel fixtures; porcelain trim in aqua. The pool outside had a specially constructed tributary that could feed right into the jacuzzi when the little steel security hatch was raised. The jacuzzi seated four, the shower, ditto, and the in-name-only tub was actually a large bronze dish set into mosaic tile. It looked like the world’s biggest birdbath, but Manphibian could extend his arms and legs and do a horizontal cartwheel-revolve inside without ever bumping the rim.

  Manphibian stripped away his sunglasses and worked himself over with bug spray and a toothbrush. He did not have teeth, but had found toothbrushes to be excellent tools for cleaning his eusuchian scalework. Then he showered off. The taps were for hot, cold, fresh, or salt. He usually did not bother to dry; lack of moisture was bad for his armored skin and his scale ridges could rip towels to ribbons by the truckload. Besides, his entire house was more or less waterproofed, the most obvious evidence being the layer of hardball rubber that covered the floor everywhere except in his “swamp room.”

  “Arroooggh,” he said, with satisfaction.

  A studio guy was coming up here for a meeting today. Some new newt from Production. Manphibian felt sure it was to discuss not a project, but the project—a remake/update of his debut feature film, buzzed and rumored for about a decade now, and counting. The movie that would reinvigorate the franchise and put Manphibian back in the Monster Top Ten of all time.

  It excited him.

  On the far side of the deck, Sofia was sunning her bush. The very concept of pubic hair was another potent turn-on for Manphibian, whose fluted penis had already telescoped from beneath its protective sheath-plate, self-lubricated with electrolytic secretions. Crotaline tessellations on the head and shaft kept the penis anchored during underwater mating; Sofia called them “pleasure ridges.” Women wanted Manphibian because his unique metabolism destroys pesky viruses and invasive micro-organisms—one of the reasons he can regenerate missing parts and live so long. They also wanted him because he was different, and almost never needed to come up for air.

  Before wandering back to the deck, Manphibian put his shades back on. They were special goggles, custom-ground to keep the sun from hurting his delicate metallic eyes, and fashioned to overcome his lack of external ears. He checked himself in the bathroom mirror. Smooth.

  Manphibian flipped Sofia to hands and knees and mounted her. The species concept of foreplay was unknown and irrelevant to him, although Bryce the agent had mentioned it. Once. The act was finished inside of forty-five minutes. Manphibian had met Sofia at a film retrospective of his work. Her favorite novel was Mrs. Caliban, by Rachel Ingalls, and her curiosity was predictable but honest. The amazing thing was that she had stayed with Manphibian even after the gloss of the new or the spice of the different had dissipated. She could have had any weightlifter on Venice Beach. She was possessed of long, tawny legs, small feet, about ten pounds of rail-straight, burnished brown hair, and perhaps the only pair of 38Ds in Los Angeles that were real breasts. Most importantly to Manphibian, she read books. He would sit in his bronze tub and she would share books with him, reading aloud by the antique glow of oil-fed hurricane lamps, her eyes a color Manphibian had never seen before in any creature of the sea—an arid brown, almost tan, like fossilized sandstone beneath a sheen of oil.

  One of Manphibian’s favorite short stories was about a Japanese man catapulted back to 1745 by the Hiroshima mega-blast, to be mistaken for a sea monster by the Scots who net him. His skin color is “yellow like a slug’s belly” and “covered from throat to ankle with brilliantly colored images of strange monsters.” Communication is attempted but there is no common ground…hence, obvious monster. Manphibian can relate. That beleaguered Japanese in the story had lacked the benefit of professional representation.

  Sofia orgasmed like a broiling thunderhead, plateauing into a weird sort of Zen state. When Manphibian disengaged, she kissed him and jumped into the pool to paddle around. The way human beings swim amused Manphibian; like dogs trying to fly. The way Sofia swam just aroused him. Sometimes he stroked up from beneath, to penetrate her as she floated. He had to remember not to hold her under too long.

  The pool was always clean. In the matter of the elimination of bodily waste, Manphibian did not suffer what Bryce unfortunately refers to as the “goldfish syndrome.”

  Manphibian’s backstory was pretty much a rags-to-riches thing. Enroute from South America, he did bayou time, making friends with the water witches and the Peremalfait. His nostalgia was for python jerky, alligator wine, and mocha native girls by the village-full. In California, he could live like a king. Down in the Amazonas, he could be a god.

  So why was he still here, outmoded by decades? The ongoing mutation that was his lifeforce had vacu-formed him into an antique. Today, sitting by his anti-linear pool, Manphibian had himself become nostalgia. So…why?

  Manphibian knew “why” the day he had met Sofia at the seminar. The day a crowded auditorium had stood and applauded his old black-and-white adventures in 3-D. Perhaps that was the day that he admitted he was hooked. It was the reason he was waiting around, today, right now, for some chinless VP of Production to toss him a table scrap.

  Sometimes, when Manphibian got depressed, he drove his Dodge Marlin all the way out of Mulholland to the sea. The last time he did this, he was mugged by bangers who stole his Platinum Card. Now Bryce, the agent, wanted him to have a bodyguard.

  Dixie Kay Snow, Manphibian’s very first cinematic leading lady, had called to ask if he could help her get a new agent. Not many parts were being cast for ingenues whose prime had slipped past the spoilage date decades ago. Then she asked if she could borrow ten grand. Manphibian sent her a check for three, knowing he’ll never see that money again, even though his tax bracket still hovered at forty-eight percent, due mostly to his participation in merchandising.

  Overall, Manphibian did not go out as much as he used to. While he enjoyed celebrity in cautious doses, he resented being asked to stand in the koi pond at the French Quarter Restaurant while snickering people snapped stupid photos with cheap, idiot-proof cameras. Every fucking time.

  “I think my client was seeking more of an ecological feel,” Bryce told the studio guy. “You know—a save-the-rainforests sort of vibe.”

  The enemy, whose name was Shelby something, nodded importantly. His college major had been “nod.” Manphibian already hated Shelby’s suctorial mouth.

  Bryce was sitting on the waterproof sofa, dramatically framed by a floor-to-ceiling aquarium stocked with outrageously colored exotics. Manphibian’s actual snack tank was back near the pantry because it was not built for ostentation. Bryce was backlit, the room light falling to place Shelby in the interrogation hot spot. All this negotiative strategy had been mapped for Manphibian earlier; now Bryce expounded, for Sh
elby’s benefit:

  “Tens of thousands of acres are getting cleared down there, day to day, for three reasons—timber, fuel, and agriculture. As a metaphor, it’s irresistible in terms of plot—the bad guys, in messing with Manphibian, are jeopardizing a one-of-a-kind intelligent creature in the process.”

  Just a week ago, Manphibian had read the latest hopeless attempt at a screenplay. No meat to it. Just by-rote formulaic monster vomitus. If there had been any meat to the story, or characters, or plot, then the writing would have classed as butchery…but it lacked any emotion so strong.

  But Shelby the Development Nod had a blank, puzzled expression marring his soft face.

  Bryce pressed dutifully on: “Manphibian stands for everything that is ancient and enduring and on the verge of being lost. For this story to get up and walk, it’s got to evolve some legs. It needs a subtext. Some depth.”

  Shelby the Nod moved his head around. “See, the major problem is, I think we need a new version of Manphibian. A kinda nineties version.”

  Manphibian and Bryce stared at each other. It was as if the proposal had been to update the title of Poe’s “City Beneath the Sea” to “Bite the Brown Bubbles.”

  The Nod expanded on his brilliant creative epiphany: “See, I showed the original Manphibian flick to my kid. He’s thirteen. And he wasn’t scared.”

  They waited. Scary was easy. Put a claw-tip right on the wet surface of someone’s eyeball and you got scary.

  “See, we think the uh, monster needs a redesign.” He unveiled a xerox of a sketch.

  Scary? thought Manphibian. Shelby’s teen bratling should get a glimpse of his dad, naked with a hard-on.

  The critter on the paper had a humanoid torso with extra abs and the muscle cut of a comicbook superhero. The legs were backward-jointed, like those of a dog. The head was snaky, blunt as a lead bullet, and hanging off the end of a neck straight out of Loch Ness. Its hands were too goddamned big. It had great big scary teeth and no pupils in its eyes.